An essay on language
Introductory note: It is the reader´s responsibility to participate in the writing process of this text. The intention is to check by interactive means if the argument makes sense.
Useless, yes. Fun, neither.
Language as Simulation: Jacques Derrida
Our mother tongue is nothing but fiction. It´s Derrida´s statement. And he goes further: I am language.
According to Derrida this should be the first statement to be pronounced by any individual: I am language. He considers language an intimate, intrinsic element that inhabits and circulates in each one of us, with its own complex and singular design; like a fingerprint, or the unique rhythm of our breathing. Language is strictly individual and logocentrist. Derrida makes us declare ourselves monolingual because he denies all those hours spent with Rosetta Stone, the Alliance Francaise, or the Goethe Institute.
In his book Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, Derrida establishes two laws that, while he declares them fixed, immovable, and antagonistic, I consider them the act of a tightrope walker with diploma:
- There´s only one language, unique in itself.
- Therefore, there will never be one language.
Derrida, postmodern and a deconstructionist, to whom making philosophy equals playing with words, has fun with his accurate (half of the time) and self-annihilating (the other half) rhetoric. When he says he does not believe in the existence of a mother tongue he argues against language, an essential part of his philosophy, and he declares: I possess one language only; but its not mine. The language on which his philosophical coordinates navigate is French; however, once he´s on the high seas of abstract thought he ignores the mainland: he reconsiders French as a foreign guest that inadvertently invades him.
Monolinguism is a natural habitat, he says, that begins to develop in ourselves even before we are able to speak and, simultaneously, predetermines our inevitable solitude and isolation. In this academically-trained juggling act, Derrida´s discourse aims at the bull´s eye: the void. Such is his intention, after all. Substracting certainties and adding up denials is the only possible path to retrace man´s steps and reach our lost origins. Derrida here is very close to the poets, searching for Adam´s paradise, so that he, a man without a mother tongue, can give things their first name.
We don’t want to distance ourselves too much from Derrida´s circus, but its essential, for the purpose of this text, to understand little, and preferably nothing. If we grant Derrida a vote of trust and consider -- putting aside our polluted, Western mentality -- that the scheme of the mother tongue that we´re destined to repeat is nothing but a simulation (it can not be identical, nor can it suggest the same meaning, in spite of our use of the same words), therefore, the language we use is pure fiction. And, on top of that, Jacques Deleuze, a good friend of Derrida, states: Simulation is a copy without the original.
So IF:
Our laguage is simulation,
then:
Our language is a copy without the original.
Just like that, language is out of our reach, isolated, with the sad quality of a mirage. Here, though, I´m going to part ways with Derrida and say maybe it is time to admit that we can create an original language in tune to our ___________________ (agnostic / Republican / Democrat ) linguistic needs.
Private Language: Ludwig Wittgenstein
The idea of a private language was introduced for the first time to the philosophical forum through Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Logocentrist, like Derrida, Wittgenstein established: Man is a microcosmos: I am my own world. One of his most important philosophical treaties, Tractacus Logico-Philosophicus, is based on logic and linguistic analysis. In his next book, Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein suggests that the laws that rule the use of language and make communication possible depend upon a tacit, general agreement regarding human behavior –just as there is, for example, an implied uniformity of reaction to look at what we point out with our finger. Nonetheless, in his theory of a private language, he explains that words refer to what is known by the transmitter, words that express his most immediate private sensations, so that there is no recipient who can understand the exact message the transmitter is saying. Language is understood only by the one who uses it – the transmitter harvesting from the very root of his tongue—because the things that define his vocabulary are, necessarily, inaccessible to others. This is almost as ______________________ (introspective / controversial / perverse) as saying that there would have to be a dictionary for every _____________________ (Mary / David / Muhammad / Other), something that actually happens among philosophers. Of course Wittgenstein will not refrain from establishing right away the antithesis to his own thesis; if the message can´t be intelligible to ____________________ (Mary / David / Muhammad / Other), it can´t be intelligible to the one who delivers the message since he/she wouldn´t be able to establish the precise connections and equivalences to its original signs (or: the original sources of the message). To Wittgenstein, in spite of building the nullification of his own theory almost to the point of considering it absurd, the possibility of thinking in a private language turned out to be essential for the evolution of many modern philosophical schools of thought, such as epistemology, the philosophy of the mind, and metaphysics which, from Descartes to the most recent versions of theories regarding mental representations, have been relevant to the 20th century Congnitivism. Descartes himself thought that even if his ideas of the exterior world happened to be wrong, he could avoid making further mistakes if he limited his judgement to his own immediate sensations.
If Wittgenstein´s theory is correct it would be impossible to determine if Wittgenstein´s theory is correct. Due to language´s own relativity, it will remain secluded in its own linguistic prison. It´s impossible, therefore, to attain to a universal metalanguage that gives birth to a microcosmic, or individual, language. There´s no way for an individual to discover the matrix of his own language, or even the simulation of it; there´s no method of merging, or fusing, the copy and its original. No original language in stock, reminds us Deleuze.
Derrida, heir of some of Wittgenstein´s school of thought, insists, nevertheless, in his project to deconstruct the Western logocentrism and its signs. He´s a linguistic suicide with an infantile attitude, self-exiled from the French language or any other language with copyright. He´s on to something when he exclaims:
I ALWAYS LIE. I SAY IT BECAUSE IT´S TRUE.
Contradictions like the one above, he explains, abound in language, and these are symptoms of how imperfect, and deficient, it is. We have to submit language to new challenges. We have to knead it, or smash it to pieces. Bring the guillotine to the suffixes. Language is an organic phenomenon, in a continuous evolutionary process, that should aspire to a more internal, subjective outcome as opposed to the overwhelming tension produced by ordinary language, systematic and homogenous, sterile and paralytic, that’s been promoted by the _______________ (techno- / cyber- / patho- ) logical era.
Let´s look now at the literary spectrum. For Jorge Luis Borges, language meant a tradition of representing, and feeling, reality. His reality. But if you´re not Borges, isn´t this an echo of fiction? ___________________ (Isn´t this nonsense? / Where´s this labyrinth´s exit? / Wouldn’t you mistrust the opinions of whoever wrote this text?). To Wittgenstein, favouring the individualist philology, language is a way of life. The Sapir-Whorf theory, named after two linguists, consists of these two premises:
- There´s a close link between thought and word.
- Each language implicitly contains an unspoken philosophical agreement.
Noam Chomsky also agrees: language and thought are interdependent. According to Whorf, language, thought, and reality are the three elements that make up the linguistic relativity principle. And language in and of itself implies a connection of ideas: an organization, a classification and an adaptation of experience.
Sapir, in 1929, believed that the importance of language lies in its psychological configurative value (like Gestalt), and that linguistics have the potential to be a guide to the psychological geography of world culture. Take the Hopis, for example, the Native American Indians whose language excludes any reference to Time and Space. Verbs do not have any grammatical conjugations. Their language is a constant happening, their actions are happening. Linguistically there is no past or future that frame their actions.
There´s another branch of thought from the empiricists Condillac and Turgot. At the end of the eighteenth century they were tracing parallels between the linguistic and philosophical advances, and they believed that the historic progress of the human race was based on a pattern of psychological development whose goal was to embody abstract reasoning; that is, as the individual evolves to a more rational being, so too does his or her language. Language undergoes a maturation process until it becomes an efficient, precise, and more scientific ________________ (tomato / mechanism / herbicide).
At the turn of the twentieth century, Bertrand Russell advocated the same thing: he believed that in a logically perfect language there would be only one word for every simple object, and for more complex objects, compound words could be used. The outcome would be a totally analytical, and absolutely personal, language.
But leaving aside the philosophical intentions to reveal the truth in the world, that dubious fiction, let´s return to the idea of literature and its aspiration to create new realities. We can refer to the traditional idea that WE ARE what we recognize outside of ourselves, and if the act of language is an act of identity, then we are what we speak. Orally, we sculpt a portrait of our ____________ (introverted / outgoing / eccentric / incipient) personality. The way we define ourselves in the world is in tune with our ability to decode the signs of the environment in which we live. The ultimate signs are textual. And the highest rank of literature is poetry.
Poetry as representation.
The poet´s duel.
The main concern of the poet is to search for personal truth, said Octavio Paz. If the philosopher is a tightrope walker, the poet is a juggler. The language of the poet minimizes the distance between what is ideal and what is real. He is the leading figure of echoes and reflections. And then, of course, the poet is meant to exercise a permanent struggle against language: a poem is the crucial moment on the battleground. This is particularly true of poets who are exiles. [1]
Exile disturbs and dislocates the identity, brakes the chains of what was and what is, and the I am becomes an improvised invention. For poets and writers language is a discovery, an expropriation, a seizure, and it is also a ____________________ (dark cave / a rent controlled apartment in the East Village / a nouvelle cuisine craving). And it´s also a muscle for a kiss. Hemorrhoids, chiropractors, and gin.
The writer Calvert Casey oscillates between his mother tongue, Spanish, and his second tongue, English. Born in Baltimore in 1924 in a Cuban household, he spent most of his childhood and teenage years in Havana. He was influenced by the erotic poems of the Cuban poet Virgilio Piñera. Homosexual like Piñera, Casey´s relationship with English is different from his relationship with Spanish. His Spanish is simple, his English personal. Spanish, for Casey, was the language of simulation. In Spanish he pretended to be heterosexual. Of all his short stories in English –mostly autobiographical—many of the characters that are gay men became, when he translated them into Spanish, women. His Spanish is English in drag. Simulacrum is alive in Casey´s Spanish. In the Spanish version of his story Piazza Mangana, for example, there is a mutation, a kind of a corporal faxsimile without an original –the true original was written in English, which was accordingly more sensual, but it’s a different version. Yes, reader, we are making connections out of pure __________________ (miracle / accident / desperate duty), so we can get closer to, although it´s doomed to failure, language´s ideal.
Casey said: More silence will bring less corruption. Casey stuttered, a possible sign of his distress with languages due to his chronic linguistic infidelity. Language as a subject is present in El regreso, a story about his return to Cuba, where he explores an interesting comparison between language and power. The story is a return to the Spanish language, and Casey fails. As he did when he translated Piazza Mangana to Spanish, Casey finds no freedom in his mother tongue. The importance of Piazza Mangana relies in that it is a story about the body--the corporeal presence--of the language, and the body is being liberated within the text. As opposed to his Spanish translation, the body remains free in the English version, and the climax is the exile´s fantasy: the return to one´s origin through the foreign body of a lover. It is through seducing the lover that the exile´s identity reveals itself through language.
Among jugglers of words, desire is a metaphor for the desire to obtain linguistic power. Casey, like Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, and many others, juggles with different levels of fantasy and reality. Like a mise-en-abym, the text within the text, the body within the body, language within the language, an octagon of mirrors, an Escher drawing, a copy without _______________ an (original / original / original). Such is the spiral of desire.
But language does not resolve the problem of identity, as the philosophers had foreseen. To the Spanish poet Luis Cernuda it means air; to another Spanish poet, Pedro Salinas, it means light. Traversable, solvent, unruly. Both poets were _______________ (human / all too human / Spanish exiles). To bring this discursive essay to a close, well delve into Cernuda out of ________________ (sympathy / fatigue / contempt of one another). Cernuda´s Vivir sin estar viviendo (To Live Without Living), is part of a larger work called La realidad y el deseo (Reality and Desire). To say the title and then say it´s like a body inhaling and exhaling is _______________ (the same thing / a redundant, useless emphasis / a waste of ink). What rules Cernuda´s poetry is unrequited desire and a deceptive, illusory reality. For the exile, language is a distant land, a foreign acquaintance. Some sort of a centripetal force attracts everything –illusory, unsatisfactory or relative—towards the poet´s center, building up an identity. Let us remember: we are language. Language is also a space in which we live, or long to live in, and we pay for it. Everything is a paradox. When I try to put myself into words I _______________ (do / don’t / maybe) exist.
[1] It happens among philosophers too: Derrida considered himself self-exiled from the French language in spite of practicing it on a daily basis. Wittgenstein experienced another kind of exile: he refused to accept his legitimate inheritance and rebelled against the aristocratic practices of his wealthy family.
